Introduction

In the previous chapter, you learned how to prepare data using extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines to feed it efficiently into an AI system. In contrast, in this chapter, we'll take a break from looking at how things could be done, and we'll start asking whether they should be done. As with many new fields, AI has run up against ethical considerations. Ethics itself is always a topic that sparks controversy but combine that with a field that people often still associate with killer robots, and you're bound to find some very difficult and hotly debated topics.

Even outside of AI, robots can get into ethical trouble. For example, in 2014, the artistic group "!Mediengruppe Bitnik" created an automated trading bot that could buy random items from the so-called "dark web." The dark web is like the world wide web that most of us use every day, but you will not find its pages indexed on search engines such as Google. Instead, pages...